RIP Mark Strand

[Finding IT]

Unless you follow contemporary poetry closely, you have likely never come across Mark Strand. He was perhaps my favorite poet in the last 40 years or so. And when he came to Hopkins, I had an opportunity to hear him read several times and even took him to lunch once. Just a genius with language and he wrote with an ease that his images and themes were intertwined in something that seemed close to dance, for me.

 

Here is one of my favorite poems of his and it is especially apropos for this dark day in American Letters.

 

It is true, as someone has said, that in

a world without heaven all is farewell.

Whether you wave your hand or not,

 

It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes

It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,

Hating what passes, it is still farewell.

 

Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean

Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans

Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting,

 

Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement

Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body

Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being

 

Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion

Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,

Feeling the weight of the pelicans’ wings,

 

The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken

The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions

Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end

 

Is enacted again and again. And we feel it

In the temptations of sleep, in the moon’s ripening,

In the wine as it waits in the glass.

[Babycat]

I'm not familiar with his name, but that's a nice poem. :)